All That Remained

The first morning

I woke up in your house

You walked outside

To find

That in the night

Your bird had flown away

And all

That remained

Was me

And her cage. 

Thirty Things, Number 3: Climb a Mountain in Wales

I could write it, in summary, like this:

4:20am. Tuesday. I’m awake. By which I mean my alarm is making noise and my eyes are open and I’m turning off the alarm and I’m no longer asleep. 4:47am, I’m sitting next to Laura, on the platform at Latimer Rd tube stop. Then we’re on the train at Euston. Then we change trains a few times and its 11:30, but I feel like it’s the afternoon and we’re in Wales, in Betws Y Coed. We get on a bus, then walk for an hour through farms and that sort of thing, dump our stuff in a bunk house and we eat lunch, then I climb a mountain, come back down and go to bed and get up early the next day, walk back through a farm, get back a bus, eat breakfast at the railway station café, get on a train or two, kill time in Lladdudno Junction and finally, thirty six hours later, I’m back in London. 

Or like this: 

I say I climbed a mountain. Laura climbed a mountain. I followed her. Slowly, rather inelegantly and extremely inexpertly, I pulled myself to the top, though my body complained bitterly at being made to be so physically engaged with the outside. I don’t go outside. Well, I do. In order to sit in a park and read a book. Or, when I lived in Sydney, in a house, to hang out my washing. But yesterday I somehow crawled up a great big pile of rock; and I’m not actually sure how I feel, how I felt, about that, but I do now begin to understand the temptation of the climb-every--mountain type analogy somewhat more empirically now. 

Or I could describe it in terms of what I felt, what I thought about. 

I felt and thought a wide variety of emotions and ideas.

This is what I felt: disbelief; reluctant excitement; an inexpressible need to cry; terrified; appreciation; quietly chuffed; pain. 

Disbelief

What was I doing, why was I doing it, why had I ever thought this was something I wanted to do. Why was I hanging on to a piece of rock a long way above the ground?

Reluctant excitement

Wow, isn’t this cool. I’m out in the real world doing something and not checking facebook and that behind me is a stunning view, can I take a photo please (translation: can I stand still for a moment)? Wow, look at that aeroplane that just flew below us – Why am I here again, and can I go home now? 

An Inexpressible Need to Cry

Only I didn’t cry. Which in itself is quite an achievement for me. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Occasionally when directed to go up, obvious really, I would look at a bit of rock that my brain told me I couldn’t go up, and I wanted to cry. I wanted this rock cleft for me, and more than anything I wanted to hide in it and melt away into insignificance and not have to go any higher. And certainly not have to face coming back down again.

Terrified

Because I don’t know anything about mountains or climbing or any such thing, and there I was doing something I didn’t know how to do with no reason to believe that I could, or that I wouldn’t fall. 

Appreciation

Of Laura, for having a skill and a passion for an activity that I’d never really considered and for putting up with me. 

Quietly chuffed

Ok. I’m at the top now. Be cool. Smile. But not too much, you’ve only done what countless others have done before. 

Pain

Because I rarely require my muscles to do much more than climb the stairs at work, and goodness, on a two show day, that’s enough up and down for me. Also, because my shoes were too small.

My thoughts included the obvious, it was a long way down, and included some unsought memories, things that I’d not thought about in months, or in fact years, yet, with just a bit of outdoor climbing induced stress, there they were flooding my mind. This is what I thought about: My year 8 camp abseiling instructor; the possibility of falling off; Northern Ireland. 

My abseiling instructor

Who told me I’d never achieve anything in life. If I didn’t partake in the abseiling session. I was on camp in 1996. I was 14 and I refused to abseil. I didn’t believe him, but I also never let go of his criticism. Still I did enjoy my afternoon sitting in the sunshine reading a book while the rest of my class walked backwards off a cliff. 

The Possibility of falling off

You could fall off, purposefully, if you wanted to. I realised that, I didn’t actually consider it. It just floated into my head. Like those people at tube stops who apparently contemplate their own destructive potential to others should they push them at just the right time.  Like those who just contemplate jumping. Standing on the edge of a mountain, you realise the destructive potential of just stepping off. 

Northern Ireland 

In the summer. And of the bed that I slept in. Feeling content. But maybe I wasn’t. I thought of Port Stewart and walking five hours along the coast, to the Giant’s Causeway and sitting down on the side of the road 15 minutes in to that five hour walk, and crying because I hadn’t brought my flip flops or had the wrong jumper on or something stupid like that. And he thought I was mad and said just go back and get them because he didn’t understand, but I didn’t understand either. Because when I’m stressed I can’t think. And I don’t admit I’m stressed until later, until it doesn’t matter anymore. Because I don’t always like thinking about me or my life, because I end up convinced I’ve somehow failed, so I stay busy, and then get stressed on holidays because I’m forced to stop and let my thoughts catch up with me and run me down, so perhaps I was discontent and stressed because reality stubbornly refused to match my dreams, but I was happy, and aware that there I was, in my future, on the other side of the world and living life, but squeezing the happiness out of me due to my habit of  living under the fear of making the wrong choice and missing out on better things. 

I missed Northern Ireland. I longed for it. I longed for what I felt and who I thought I was when I was there, and that was a surprise, not to think these things, but to think them half way up a mountain, when those thoughts seemed so far off and unconnected to the present.*

So there you have it. I climbed a mountain. It was a lot of things. It was fun and tiring, terrifying and amazing. It made me think through a million things and maybe now, even though I didn’t walk backwards off a cliff aged fourteen, I’ll think differently about what I’m capable of, because perhaps that was all my abseiling instructor was getting at. I might even think differently about what, if anything, I’ve achieved, which after all was the point of this Thirty Things exercise. 

*  Editing this a month and a bit later is a strange experience in itself. I’d almost forgotten how this memory had struck me with enough force to knock me off the mountain. Reading it now, its like reading about someone else in a novel, because no longer where I’m at emotionally. I appreciate now that I’m the same person who was in Northern Ireland last summer, and that though things have changed and while the memories, thoughts and feelings I connect with that place are still mine, are still true, they are faded, and instead of inspiring a sickening longing, a nostalgia, desire to return, they inspire a longing for real and lasting contentment, and  a sense of gratitude, an acceptance of what was and who I am regardless and a readiness to keep on being me, the me that God created and saved me to be, whatever that entails. And in that readiness, I think, if I may be so presumptuous, lies the road to contentment. Huzzah. 

Absence: A reflection on Unhappiness and Rain.

You know what I think, the singer says to me,

I think he’s a cunt.

That may be.

But I have to admit I love him still.

He has to admit, well, I only know your side of the story.

This is the back story.

I loved with a love that was meant to endure,

Because anything less would have been an insult.

I gave that love to you, because you seemed to want it.

You appreciated, enjoyed, created, enlivened it.

You devoured it, grew tired of it, cast it aside.

Then I wept like you’d never seen.

Without you there to witness it, I finally crumpled

My face wet with tears

My body convulsed with anger

With fear, sadness and humiliation.

Then I did what you said I would.

I turned you into literary inspiration.

Its April, 2012, I’m in London. Its four months since the relationship I had hoped would last for a lifetime ended. The sky is grey and its pouring with rain.

Its two weeks since the rain set in. And for two weeks I’ve been feeling a lack of motivation and a suffocating sadness which settled upon me making me want to hide beneath my blanket. But I had work to do. For the last fortnight I’ve been sitting in my room making wigs and watching the rain. Whenever I looked up from my wigs, and let my gaze stretch further than the square inch of hair and lace in front of me, my view was of the damp grey urban landscape, of rain pelting down on the Westway, fat drops of water clinging to the trees, the window pane, the apartment block across the street and the umbrellas of passersby. If this was a movie or a novel, and not my life, it would be a trite and stereotypical use of objective correlative, because its also two weeks since I truly woke up to the fact that my best friend, my lover – though I would never have called him that –  was no longer mine, and that I had no reason to hope he ever would be again, no matter how much I longed for him. The truth sunk in. The sky went grey. I gave way to unhappiness. The clouds broke. And as the rain dashed across my window, I cried.

There is a lot of talk in London about rain at the moment. For the minute we seem to have forgotten the approaching summer, with the promise of extra bank holidays, The Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, because the inclement weather is making it feel like winter again, and if this rain keeps up, maybe it will never actually be summer. Too much rain and yet not enough rain. And just to make sure we know there isn’t enough rain, there on the tube, next to the advertisement advising you to take different routes to work when the network is flooded with tourists going to the games is one by Thames Water telling us that after the driest two years since records began, we’re in Drought.[1] Coming from Sydney, Australia, I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. While living in an Olympic city for the second time is a curious experience, inducing both a desire to escape life, but also a reluctant excitement, it’s the concept of drought – drought in famously drizzly overcast London – and the interplay of rain, or the lack of it, and our emotions that interests me. Why is it we mope and complain when it rains, even those of us who aren’t poets or filmmakers seeking a metaphor and who don’t suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or even winter blues, when rain is a necessary, even vital, part of our continued existence.  We think of sunny days and clear blue skies as the ideal, but if rain was forever absent from our lives, we’d actually have to accept it was cause for unhappiness.

Drought in Australia is serious business. In 2005 my friends and I drove six hours north west of Sydney to a small country town, Tambar Springs, which lies roughly between Coonabarabran and Gunnedah.  Driving up the mountains, through fairly familiar places – Leura, Katoomba – the surrounding bushland was that beautiful deep blue and olive green. Once on the other side and heading north towards Mudgee, the green fades away. The metaphorical line in the ground between the haves and the have nots, was made literal, the colour of the earth reminding east coast city kids like myself, that west of the Great Dividing Range there was something wrong with the weather. East of the mountains things were still vaguely green, west of the mountains, red, orange and brown took over. Drought was bigger than the grief felt by middle class suburbia who couldn’t believe the government could dictate what days they could water their pot plants and non native flower bushes, to car owners faced with the ignominy of wiping down their cars with a bucket and sponge, to the generations of children who would not experience the joy of a summer spent in the garden running through the sprinkler. In rural New South Wales drought swooped down upon kilometre after kilometre of farmland, and squeezed the life out of it. On either side of the highway we were confronted by dry grass, shrivelled wheat and pathetically thin livestock. Field upon field of heartbreak.

In my comfortable city life, where food came from magical places like Woolworths and Coles, now from Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, I’ve never really had to consider the personal pain of drought. Ok, I get twitchy when the sink is filled to capacity in order to wash a couple of bread plates, and now that I live in a flat and don’t have a garden, I feel a bit guilty every morning when I tip my coffee dregs into the bin rather than feeding it to plants, but my income isn’t affected, my lifestyle is not seriously challenged, my identity hasn’t been torn to pieces. Across Australia rural families whose lives were dependant on agriculture had year after year of stress, grief and financial hardship, essentially because it didn’t rain.  Or occasionally because it did, but too much too soon, with the year’s rain falling in a week, turning the dry cracked earth into a murky soup of flood water. For me, drought is a minor inconvenience; a slightly higher groceries bill, a reluctance to indulge in the luxury that is a deeply filled bathtub. For those working in farming and agricultural industries, drought “can contribute to severe mental agony due to financial hardship from increased debt” additionally, “Stress, worry and the rate of suicide increase”.[2] Perhaps even more scarily, “empirical evidence in NSW has linked drought with suicide rates demonstrating every decrease of 300mm in precipitation is linked with an 8% increase in long term mean suicide rates.”[3] That’s serious emotional interference all because of the absence of rain.

Considering the huge environmental and financial affect of drought in Australia, the way it ripped through the land, and changed much of how we think and live, its hard to apply the same word to the current weather conditions in the United Kingdom, and not feel just a bit sceptical, even cynical. Come on guys, the grass is green, the sheep are fat, bananas are still around 70p/kg, and most of all there is water falling from the sky. When I applied for driver’s license in the early noughties, I stretched the truth in my log book stating I’d had experience driving in wet weather. What wet weather? I think I drove through a light sprinkle of afternoon rain once or twice.[4]  Considering the huge emotional and psychological effect of prolonged drought in Australia its hard to accept we’re experiencing drought conditions in the UK, but then, if we are, its equally difficult to justify having a whinge about two weeks of rain.

But whinge we do. Even though common sense tell me rain is a good thing, even though I’m intellectually and environmentally aware enough to know its necessary, useful and important that there be rain, that given the real grief and stress drought causes farmers and the like its selfish and immature of me to complain about a drizzly London day, I still prefer nice sunny days. The emotional low that seems to accompany wet weather seems to make me forget how dependent we are on water, makes my problems, however small seem big. Sunshine make me happy, and the rain makes me want to mope. Additionally, at the moment anyway,  I quite like being able to blame my unhappiness on a light dose of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Despite knowing that rain is good, that drought is a serious problem, I still believe the equation that less rain plus increased sunshine equals increased happiness and that therefore my emotional well being and general life contentment is dependent on the weather.

The link between rainy weather and discontent was backed up by the Facebook status updates of my friends who From December 2011 to March 2012, complained about the weather. In London, though we were initially amazed at how mild and dry the winter was, once the snow finally fell in February, our joy at its prettiness was unsurprisingly short lived and by the next day we were complaining that the streets were covered in freezing grey slush which made life generally difficult and unpleasant. On the other side of the world Sydney was experiencing a wet and comparatively cold summer, and people were whinging. My Facebook news feed was covered with complaints about rain, having to wear coats and gumboots, not having enough opportunities to wear summer dresses, this sort of thing. The increased presence of rain in Sydney brought an increase in complaints on my newsfeed, which for the most part, smacked of an environmental short term memory crisis.  Never mind the fact that in February 2011 we complained bitterly when for a week the temperature hovered around 40 and didn’t even drop over night, and our bodies ached and we couldn’t sleep it was so hot, or more importantly that for close to a decade we’d been living with that drought, remember the one that brought those hideous water restrictions which infringed upon our middleclass right to a convenient lifestyle. So how dare the rain now come and prevent the wearing of a frilly frock and strappy shoes.

Our memories play tricks on us, that is for sure. As I sit here, questioning the legitimacy of laying the blame for my unhappiness on rainy (delayed) winter blues rather than on loosing my bestfriend/lover/boyfriend/person I wanted to marry and hang out with for the rest of forever, its easy to let the cloud of sadness descend and have no memory of ever feeling otherwise. However, I have photos to prove that in March, spring came early, and I revelled in 18 degree days, that frankly, were glorious. The sun was out, it was warm and pleasant and I left my coat at home. I was happy and life was good. But now its April. The sky is grey and pouring with rain. I actually find it a struggle to recall those few weeks of spring induced happiness. Are our memories really this short? When my then boyfriend spoke to me through the darkness and said he thought we should break up, I momentarily lost my ability to analyse my life and my happiness objectively. Even though I knew I was perfectly capable of living without him, and I knew my happiness and chances of feeling content with life were entirely independent of whether I was with him, I couldn’t imagine how that could be.  Four months later, I’m churning over the same thoughts, but I find  that its the absence of sunshine which is taking away my ability to consider life objectively and remember happiness.

Knowing that we need water, doesn’t make an oppressive grey sky all that uplifting, except for those who are keenly environmentally aware. For the rest of us I guess our memories and our emotions trample upon our intelligence and perhaps even our morality. This must be why you can live through a drought and save water and recycle and not eat meat for the sake of the environment, yet resent a summer that doesn’t suit your desire for picnics, barbeques and open toed shoes. Its probably also why we sometimes find ourselves lying in the arms of someone we desire but don’t love, or love someone even though they no longer, or perhaps never did, love you. And why when you do, why you look at them delicately, saying, do you remember? Do you remember that afternoon last August…

It is our emotions and memories that force us to replay specific events, that reinforce a chosen narrative. It never rained when I was in my early twenties, there was a drought, we syphoned the bathwater onto the back yard. Yet in 2002, aged twenty I helped pull down a Marquee in the middle of the night as it had been swamped with rain, and watched as the campsite I was meant to live on for the next ten days was promptly flooded. My memory tells me that my boyfriend loved me. It tells me of the night he woke me at three in the morning to ask for reassurance that I would look after him, it tells me how when I turned twenty-nine he said he intended to be around for at least the next twenty-nine years. My emotions tell me that surely he must still love me, even though my intelligence mocks me for harbouring such naïve hopes. 

In March when the sun was shining, unseasonably early, I dreamt of him.

I dreamt of you last night

I didn’t mean to.

I dreamt your mouth

Of your tongue

Tickling me.

And as you smelt me

You luxuriated in the memories

Of sunshine, casserole, apple cider

And earthy sweat.

 So yes, yes I do remember, that afternoon last august to which he referred the last time he visited me. And I knew beforehand that it would be the memory that he would recall. But because my intelligence and my memory are at war with each other, I chose to answer bluntly, of course I remember, rather than to indulge the spirit of reminiscence. Besides, I’d already done that when I wrote the above lines, a few weeks earlier. I also remember the picture of happiness that I never told him, a picture bathed in sunlight, a memory of an event that never was and now never will be. How before I moved to London, when I sat in Sydney and longed for his presence I dreamt him then as well. I dreamt of once again lying beside him,

Of never having to leave.

Of long summer afternoons

That stretched on and on

In endless light.

Miles away, months away

Years away.

And he would place his hands on my stomach

And smile with delight,

For a child that would be ours,

I loved him deeply. That was my failing. I went and took all the things I had wanted, all the things I hoped for and placed them on him. For nearly a decade, I’d been bitter about the life I had, and wished I’d had a different one, one where I got to be  wife and mother, and I blamed my discontent on the absence of these things, I got angry at God about it, which was foolish. It was foolish to expect a real person to be a person I had invented in my mind, in my longing and in their absence. The women I work with all complain about their partners. He doesn’t move the furniture when he cleans, he just don’t understand that I don’t eat meat. I feel a sadness when they do this because I feel certain that if I could be back in the relationship I had, I wouldn’t complain. I’d be happy. The winter following the hideously hot February, a friend of mine posted on facebook ‘come back summer, all is forgiven’. In the absence of what we all hated about summer, she can forgive the heatwave and crave the return of warmer weather. But if that 40degree week had come back, would all really have been forgiven?  Maybe she’s not as fickle as the rest. I don’t know yet, because the next summer she got was the wet one just gone, so no chance to complain about heatwaves.

Contentment, I know, is not just about the absence of the things I dislike in life, and drought isn’t just the absence of rain. Drought is about not enough rain to match human demand. So even though its raining in London at the moment, there is a real risk of there not being enough water to match human consumption. That is what makes it a drought. That’s something worth worrying about, and if  there was no water in the taps or if the wheat, rice and potatoes don’t grow that’d be something to complain about. So given we all need water, surely we in London should be rejoicing that we live in a generally wet and drizzly city, and more people in Sydney should have been glad of the respite afforded to them by a wet summer. However, it seems that our complaints about the weather are much more about the personal, than the global, and that, in turn, makes me a bit sad.  But soon the sun will be back, and then I’m sure I’ll feel fine.

---

[1] http://www.thameswater.co.uk/waterwisely/index.htm#!/about.htm?drought                                            

[2] Chand and Murthy, 2008, ‘Climate Change and Mental Health, page 45.

http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/Regional_Health_Forum_Volume_12_No_1_Climate_change_and_mental.pdf

[3]

http://www.daff.gov.au/agriculture-food/drought/drought-pilot/drought-pilot-review/drought-pilot-review-submissions/agpn_and_beyondblue                                                                 

[4] The first time I drove in real rain, for the record, was about a week after I got my full license, and I was driving a friend’s car to South West Rocks. Not only was it the first time I drove in proper wet weather, we were on the freeway, I was driving at 90km/hr (the fastest I’d driven at that point in time), the car had dodgy windscreen wipers that refused to obey me when I switched them on and it was one of those impressive north coast summer storms. So in a matter of seconds, I was no longer driving at 90 the sky dark and ominous, but at about 40, with sheets of rain upon us and with next to no visibility. Happy Days.

On Metafiction

or realising I was a nerd or a text or some such thing. Because that’s how it is. Especially if it is late at night. Which it is.

I did this really nerdy thing on the tube last night. I sent a text to my boyfriend to tell him the book I was reading was very 1960s, and a little metafictive. I flipped to the front of the book to check the publishing date (1969), and inwardly I did a little dance of joy. And then I realised not only am I a total nerd but, also like all those high school things I couldn’t remember last week, I don’t actually remember how to define metafiction. In terms of style. What made me think oh yes, here we have a piece of 1960s style, with just a dash of metafiction. I know that broadly it’s a piece of writing which is aware of its fictive status, but how to describe the style, how to explain it, gone. All I could think of was that short story I read that was about Ambrose at a playhouse. That was 1960s, post modern metafictive stuff. So come on brain, I know this blog is called reflections and fragments, but please, please, do some solid remembering.

*

The remembering probably wasn’t going to happen of its own accord. I say wasn’t, rather than isn’t because I wrote that first paragraph this afternoon and I’m writing this one now. And its now 23:32, which as it happens is a pretty awesome time. But back to the remembering, which wasn’t happening, I did a second nerdy thing. I opened up a file on my computer containing my notes from ENGL three-oh-whatever. To read my notes on metafiction and Ambrose, who as it turns out, was at a funhouse, not a playhouse. There on the screen was a list of facts about metafiction, which I knew. Metafiction pre-empts criticism, breaks the illusion that art is reality, highlights the writing process, makes direct intertexual references, directly addresses the reader, parodies established modes, acknowledges that all stories have already been told, and so on and on and on. Oh yes, I knew all these things too. And it still makes sense. Which is a relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about anymore. Or why I’m writing about it. I think tiredness is slowly seeping into my brain…

…I think I am a metafictive text. That would certainly confuse the illusion that art is reality. That is what I have learnt today. Because I pre-empt criticism, can be self-deprecating, enjoy parody, address the reader (Hiya, you right? – see that, I even went for local vernacular like a real Londoner), I acknowledge the writing procedure, and that everything has been said before, as all stories have already been told, and so on and on and on. Except I am not a fiction, because I actually exist, well, unless of course this is merely the voice of an implied narrator who actually doesn’t exist, because I actually did write this as myself. I am so confused right now.

So as you read this, if it makes any sense, or even if it doesn't please feel free to drop me a line. I'd appreciate it. We could enter into a dialogue. We could write a new text, and blur our roles of writer and reader, sender and receiver, art and reality. We could have a conversation about metafiction. We could be metafictive. Except that we are real. The conversation, however, would be both real and virtual because this is a blog not an actual verbal exchange taking place in actual time and space.

I'm confused again.

I should not write when I am tired. I do not know if I am writing a thought about metafiction, or about being a nerd, or if I am a text waiting to be read.

*

For example:

“… People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet? ...”

Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse 5, London: Vintage

I Used to Know Things...

I have a favourite study technique. I refer to it as Learning via Osmosis. LVO usually involves placing a text book under my head while I close my eyes and lie in the sunshine. It was a technique I discovered in high school and have refined over the years. And now I find that years of referring to osmosis as a technique for study, I no longer quite remember what osmosis really is, except of course that what I’m doing has nothing to do with osmosis because osmosis requires water and a semi-permeable membrane, whatever that is. Also, it isn’t about the transfer of information.

Back in the day, when I was at school in my kilt, lying in the grass, beside the school pool (the water that made Learning via Osmosis possible), with one book under my head and another balanced over my face, I knew what was osmosis actually was. I also knew how it differed from that other thing, that thing that I don’t recall, but was perhaps called diffusion. I have, just now, lowered myself to the level of someone who checks Wikipedia in order to rediscover the general knowledge they already knew, and can confirm that yes, diffusion was the word I was looking for. I used to know things. All sorts of things. About the working out of the hypotenuse of a triangle. I knew that. And working out the sizes of angles in various geometric shapes. I could do that. I knew about how cells divided, about mitosis and meiosis and which was which, and if I looked at pictures of these processes taking place I could tell you which was which, but I certainly couldn’t now.

I feel that more than anything I need to ask, where did the knowledge go? Has it left me, or is it just buried? If I started reading something about gametes and cell reproduction, would that part of my brain kick back in to gear? Or did that information leave me and become replaced with Peep Bo’s line of So Please You Sir We much Regret, a harmony I found tricksy at the time and went over so many times that when I came to learning Pitti Sing’s part ten years later, although I’d not looked at the music once in all those years, I found it was Peep Bo’s harmony and hers alone that my brain wanted my mouth to sing. Why had I retained a piece of music I hadn’t needed to sing for ten years? Why is it that the only French phrases I know (aside from the one in Lady Marmalade) are about chocolate, Je voudrais un chocolat chaud,(well, I would) le chocolat me regarde! (seriously it is, and it wants me to eat it!), yet I couldn’t ask for directions nor can I remember how to ask for train tickets. Like wise my patchy German allows me to ask someone the ever important question, bist du eine orange, but not much else.

If this is the outcome of thirteen years of school education, its tempting to ask what the point was. Why did I need to learn that stuff about osmosis and gametes and geometric proofs? Obviously, that knowledge has not been at the front of my brain for some time, and I am, for the most part a well balanced, happy and capable adult, so did it ever need to be at the front of my brain. Did I need to spend all those hours learning those things, only to forget them? But such a sentiment goes against my inherent love for learning and life long education. I place huge value on education and firmly believe that all people should have access to a wide and varied education as it helps us grow and develop and opens possibilities. I’m not for a minute suggesting that isn’t the case, I just wonder why I can’t retain endless bits of information. I worked hard at learning things, and they made sense to me, and now that knowledge is gone. I find it disturbing that once I understood something of valencies, plant and animal biology, French grammar, but that over time I let those abilities go.

While I may have had to let go of the information I wasn’t using in order to reduce clutter and make brain space available for more relevant skills, memories and theories, it just doesn’t seem fair, or even right, for knowledge to be transitory.